Tuesday, January 27, 2009

A FAN'S NOTES by Frederick Exley

"To talk about oneself a great deal can also be a means of concealing oneself." --Nietzsche, Beyond Good and EvilExley's A Fan's Notes isn't bad, but it certainly isn't great either. It doesn't live up to its most hyperbolic back cover blurb: "The best novel written in the English language since The Great Gatsby." Thus spake Newsday. Well... I know it's unfair to hold a book responsible for what a publisher's marketing department decides to slap on the back cover, but this kind of egregious hyperbole demands to be smacked down. The Sound and the Fury and Absalom! Absalom! are perhaps slightly better than A Fan's Notes and were both published between Gatsby's 1926 and Exley's 1968. But enough blurb criticism. The book itself is an interesting autobiographical fiction, a good literary drunkalogue with some excellent moments. The description of undergoing insulin and electroshock 'therapy' was especially well executed--no mean feat in dealing with subject matter that can easily slip into Snake Pit melodrama--and Exley actually managed to make interesting reading out of his months spent on a davenport staring at his feet. But I often found myself wondering what Exley wasn't telling us. What is he leaving out? I finished the book with the feeling that there was another novel (or 'fictional memoir,' to use Exley's term) concealed in the lacunae of A Fan's Notes. I also left the book thinking that for all Exley's eloquently expressed self-loathing, he probably didn't loathe himself as much as many readers will. And for all of his tough-writer, warts-and-all self-examination, there are major elements of Exley's character that remain tellingly unexamined (most strikingly, his homophobia), suggesting that at book's end, after all the apparent confessions, Exley's still living a life Socrates would consider hardly worth the effort.

ABOUT THE TITLE

The title of this blog was shamelessly stolen by the blogger (Mea culpa! Mea culpa! Me a culprit!) from a very good volume of literary criticism, Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon, edited by George Levine and David Leverenz. (Little, Brown, 1976). As all true Pynchonians know, TP's working title for Gravity's Rainbow was Mindless Pleasures.

MY TOP SHELF: BEST OF THE BEST NOVELS

ULYSSES by James Joyce

THE TRIAL by Franz Kafka

TRISTRAM SHANDY by Laurence Sterne

THE MASTER AND MARGARITA by Mikhail Bulgakov

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

MOBY DICK by Herman Melville

IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME by Marcel Proust

ABSALOM, ABSALOM! by William Faulkner

WAR AND PEACE by Leo Tolstoy

SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION by Gustave Flaubert

NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov

BLOOD MERIDIAN by Cormac McCarthy

THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO THE LIGHTHOUSE by Virginia Woolf

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING by Milan Kundera

THE GHOST WRITER by Philip Roth

AUSTERLITZ by W. G. Sebald

THE SATANIC VERSES by Salman Rushdie

AGAINST THE DAY by Thomas Pynchon

SOME GREAT BOOKS MOST PEOPLE HAVEN'T READ

A COOL MILLION by Nathanael West

AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

BEAUTIFUL LOSERS by Leonard Cohen

CAMERA LUCIDA by Roland Barthes

CENTURY OF THE WIND by Eduardo Galeano

DOWNRIVER by Iain Sinclair

FADO ALEXANDRINO by Antonio Lobo Antunes

HUNGER by Knut Hamsun

INVISIBLE CITIES by Italo Calvino

JACQUES THE FATALIST by Denis Diderot

L'ASSOMMOIR by Emile Zola

MAN IN THE HOLOCENE by Max Frisch

ON THE YARD by Malcolm Braly

POEMS OF PAUL CELAN (trans. by Michael Hamburger)

PUDD'NHEAD WILSON by Mark Twain

SELECTED ESSAYS by John Berger

THE ASPERN PAPERS by Henry James

THE ATLAS by William T. Vollmann

THE BEAUTIFUL ROOM IS EMPTY by Edmund White

THE BOOK OF DISQUIET by Fernando Pessoa

THE LOSER by Thomas Bernhard

FAVORITE POETS

Ovid

Dante

Shakespeare

John Donne

John Milton

William Blake

William Wordsworth

J. C. F. Holderlin

Percy Bysshe Shelley

John Keats

Walt Whitman

Emily Dickinson

Charles Baudelaire

Gerard Manley Hopkins

W. B. Yeats

Rainer Maria Rilke

T. S. Eliot

D. H. Lawrence

Guillaume Apollinaire

William Carlos Williams

Hart Crane

Wallace Stevens

W. H. Auden

Dylan Thomas

Allen Ginsberg

James Dickey

Philip Larkin

Robert Lowell

Anne Sexton

Pablo Neruda

Paul Celan

Seamus Heaney

Richard Howard

John Ashbery

SOME FAVORITE NONFICTION BOOKS

A HISTORY OF NARRATIVE FILM by David A. Cook

A LIFE OF PICASSO by John Richardson

A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES by Howard Zinn

AGAINST INTERPRETATION by Susan Sontag

BASIC WRITINGS ON POLITICS AND PHILOSOPHY by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM by Edward Said

DISPATCHES by Michael Herr

EXISTENTIALISM FROM DOSTOYEVSKY TO SARTRE edited by Walter Kaufmann

FICTION AND THE FIGURES OF LIFE by William H. Gass

FOOTSTEPS: ADVENTURES OF A ROMANTIC BIOGRAPHER by Richard Holmes

IMPRESSIONISM: ART, LEISURE AND PARISIAN SOCIETY by Robert L. Herbert

INWARDNESS AND EXISTENCE by Walter A. Davis

LIGHTS OUT FOR THE TERRITORY by Iain Sinclair

MANUFACTURING CONSENT by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman

OUT OF SHEER RAGE: WRESTLING WITH D.H. LAWRENCE by Geoff Dyer

POSTWAR: A HISTORY OF EUROPE SINCE 1945 by Tony Judt

REMBRANDT'S EYES by Simon Schama

SEXUAL PERSONAE by Camille Paglia

STUDIES IN CLASSIC AMERICAN LITERATURE by D.H. Lawrence

THE ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE by Harold Bloom

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE by Edward Gibbon

THE GAY SCIENCE by Friedrich Nietzsche

THE GOD DELUSION by Richard Dawkins

THE GREAT WAR AND MODERN MEMORY by Paul Fussell

THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS by Sigmund Freud

THE RENAISSANCE by Walter Pater

THE SHOCK DOCTRINE by Naomi Klein

THE SHOCK OF THE NEW by Robert Hughes

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann